Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

In our ISV Engineering organization, we do some pretty cool work with a variety of software companies built around open source business models; here are just a few of our more strategic open source partners.  This week, we published some work we've been doing with Terracotta for the last few months to help them optimize their technology on Sun's products.  The 4-page document provides an overview of the business benefits of Terracotta for Java developers, plus some results of testing we did with Terracotta on both x64 and CMT servers.  We also ran their same tests on RedHat Enterprise Linux to see how we did.  We did great.

I really like what Terracotta's done; my overly-simplistic explanation of what they do is to hook into a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and link it with other JVMs working together, so that a cluster of JVMs look like a single, big JVM to the Java developer.  The significance is this: if you're a Java developer and you want to easily scale up your application so it can take on more load, Terracotta makes it really easy for you to do that.



In the document that we published, we showed the results of tests we did with sample workloads that Terracotta created to demonstrate what it can do for some common Java application scenarios.  (one scenario models an online test-taking application where many people login concurrently to take their tests, maybe leave the test midway through, come back where they left off, etc.)  If you look at the results table, you'll see a couple of results that I find interesting:

1. Performance of Terracotta on Solaris vs. RedHat.  Everything else was the same: same JVM, same physical hardware.  But Terracotta on Solaris performed much better, making more efficient use of the compute resources.  You leave less of your computing budget on the table with Terracotta on Solaris, is what this says to me.
2. Terracotta performance on CMT.  On the T5240 CoolThreads server, we didn't get the top result, but we had plenty of headroom to go (using 9% of the CPU resource available), which means we could launch more copies of Terracotta, or the Java application itself.  Our tests with Terracotta show us we can use CMT to get massive scaling; the results table clearly reflects that.

Once we started scaling up with Terracotta on CMT, we started to notice that their persistence mechanism was becoming a bottleneck (if you read more about Terracotta, you find that they make your cluster of JVMs reliable because Terracotta keeps track of Java objects that change, and persists those changes to its local disk).  So we introduced Terracotta to our solid state disk (SSD) products and configured the Terracotta server to persist its data to the SSDs instead of spinning disk.  That essentially gave us reliability at in-memory speeds which means that you don't have to make the tradeoff of performance vs. reliability.  It's very cool.

We've had a blast working with Terracotta; they're sharp people, and they create a product that I think is hugely valuable to Java developers, especially those trying to write apps that work at large scales on the web.  If you're such a developer, you should check them out.  Their software is available as open source and it works.

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This week's announcement that VMWare is acquiring SpringSource sure caught me by surprise.  I'm not surprised that VMWare is making an acquisition; it clearly needs to get away from the "one trick pony" problem of being known only as a hypervisor vendor, because there are many entrants in that field now, and it will become commoditized soon.

What surprised me was that VMWare picked a company known for its support of software development frameworks, namely, the Spring framework.  Also what surprised me was that VMWare pretty much explicitly commits to Java as the programming language of choice for their cloud offering.

Don't get me wrong: I love Java as a choice of programming language.  But I have two basic questions about this choice:

1. Really?  Java is the language you're choosing for rapid-beyond-belief development and deployment of applications on the web?
2. Why is VMWare locking themselves into a single language?  That's essentially what I get out of the announcement and press.

Maybe there weren't any other credible candidate frameworks in PHP, for example.

Here is a nicely-written opinion piece by an IBM guy about what the deal means to VMWare and the industry.  I like his take that this purchase is less help to VMWare's cloud vision than what you might think, but it does help VMWare get into the addressable market for application servers

But what do you think is going on?  Why did VMWare choose to buy SpringSource?  Does this really make VMWare more credible as a cloud vendor, or do you think VMWare is off track with this decision?

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I came across this nice blog entry that shows how you can use ZFS's snapshot and rollback features along with VirtualBox to make it really easy (and safe) to try things out during development and not have to worry about losing track of exactly which changes you made when you want to go back to a clean state.

For me, this helps in creation of web sites.  I am using Drupal to create a web site, but there's a lot of exploratory development I'm doing and if I mess up something, I want to go back to a known-to-work state.  So, I create a VirtualBox image (OpenSolaris as my guest OS), then work with Drupal on that image.  The thing is, sometimes I make changes that affect the state of the operating system so I want to cleanly go back to a working state.  This blog entry shows me how to do exactly that.

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Every summer, my personal obsessions take a break from their normal subjects of computing and other technology, and veer toward a long time favorite hobby: drum and bugle corps.


The world championships are this week.  Quarterfinals competition begins at 3:30PM Pacific Time today in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Semifinals are tomorrow, and the finals (Top 12 corps) are this Saturday.

My favorite, as usual, is the Santa Clara Vanguard.  It looks like the clear leader this year is the Blue Devils, from Concord, CA, but second through fifth place is up for grabs for any of four corps, including the Vanguard.

I won't be able to make it to Indianapolis to attend the shows in person, so I'm going to watch quarterfinals live at my local theater.  The DCI organization is broadcasting the event live and you can go buy tickets just like any movie.  The theater will be filled with other drum corps nerds just like me.

But wait, there's more!  I will also be attending the free snapcast created for the event, on G-Snap!  I've mentioned snapcasting before; a couple of weeks ago, over 800 people attended a live snapcast of a regional drum corps show so I'm anticipating a big crowd for today's competition.  I'll follow the snapcast on my mobile phone while I'm in the theater; that should make the whole experience a lot more fun: while I'm watching the competition on the big screen, I'll be able to comment with other nerds like me nationwide, as it happens.

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